Doors of refrigerating appliances are conventionally constructed from an outer wall, usually a metal sheet, which is cut from a roll to a length corresponding with the height of the door to be produced and is subsequently bent at several places to respectively form the front plate of the door, lateral limbs adjoining longitudinal edges of the front plate and inwardly bent straps adjoining the limbs, and an inner wall, which is formed by deep-drawing from flat plastics material and fastened to the straps of the outer wall. The cavity formed between outer wall and inner wall is closed by an upper closure element and a lower closure element, which are respectively fastened to the transverse edges of inner wall and outer wall, and is filled with an insulating foam material.
FIG. 1 shows a schematic part section through a first example of a conventional refrigerating appliance equipped with such a door. The body 1 of the refrigerating appliance, against which the door 2 abuts, extends upwardly beyond the upper edge of the door, and a control panel 3 is mounted on the body 1 above the door 2. The control panel serves the purpose of accommodating switches, buttons or other operating elements for setting an operational state of the refrigerating appliance, as well as indicating elements giving information about operating parameters of the refrigerating appliance, in a position readily accessible to the user.
In order to be able to satisfy the taste of the widest possible range of buyers it is desirable for the manufacturers of refrigerating appliances to be able to offer refrigerating appliances with different appearances, in which connection a particular significance attaches to the door as the most conspicuous part of the refrigerating appliance. One such possibility of modifying the appearance is to make the door so large that it covers the body of the refrigerating appliance over its entire height inclusive of a possible control field mounted thereat. One conceivable solution of this problem is sketched in FIG. 2. In the case of a known refrigerating appliance, outer wall 4 and inner wall 5 of the door are prolonged up to the height of the upper edge of the body 1 and covered there by a closure element 6. This solution is unsatisfactory for several reasons. Since space is no longer available for the control panel, the control elements either have to be directly mounted at the front edge of the body 1 at the place which in the case of the refrigerating appliance of FIG. 1 has supported the control panel, which is problematic since in this region the inner container 7 and outer wall of the body 1 adjoin one another, or a completely different location for the control elements has to be selected, which obliges extensive constructional changes relative to the refrigerating appliance of FIG. 1 and is correspondingly expensive. In addition, prolongation of the inner wall 5 makes it impossible to produce this by the same deep-drawing tools as the inner wall of the door of FIG. 1, which substantially increases the cost of parallel production of refrigerating appliances according to FIG. 1 and FIG. 2.
FIG. 3 shows another known form of construction of a refrigerating appliance housing in a schematic section analogous to that of FIGS. 1 and 2. This housing is distinguished from that of FIG. 1 in that the control panel 3 is omitted and instead thereof the closure element 6, which connects together the upper transverse edges of outer wall 4 and inner wall 5 of the door 2, is significantly widened so that it is flush with the upper edge of the body 1. This solution has the advantage that it can be realised simply and economically, since body and inner and outer wall of the door can be identical with those of the appliance of FIG. 1 and the differences are substantially limited to the control panel 3 and the closure element 6. However, the wide strip which the widened closure element 6 occupies at the upper edge of the door 2 gives the appliance of FIG. 3 a high degree of similarity to that of FIG. 1.